I Can Teach You
to be Happy Implementation Guide
Rewire Your Focus to Install the Happiness Habit Congratulations on making it to the Implementation phase of the I Can Teach You To Be Happy minicourse! By this point you already have the information necessary to begin consciously and intentionally creating tremendous happiness in your life. Before you’re able to enjoy the abundant happiness that is your birthright, however, you’re going to have to convert this practical information into powerful experiential knowledge by applying it consistently and persistently to the formerly unconscious processes by which you generate your Feelings, Emotional States, and Internal Experiences. As you now know, generating happiness is a skill. As with any skill, knowing how to do something isn’t the same as being able to perform it at a mastery level. True mastery requires consistent and persistent practice to cultivate and maintain. In the case of happiness the reward is well worth the effort, however, because happiness and the positive feelings and emotional states associated with it is the Master Key which unlocks the door to your infinite potential and boundless internal resources. You’ve also learned that every Feeling and Emotional State you experience flows from and occurs as a result of your Focus.
The quality of your Feelings is determined by the quality of your Focus, and if you want more happiness in your life the only way to get it is to fix your Focus first so that it is consistent with and capable of generating the kind of Feelings you desire. With a little bit of effort, you can make happiness a habit and generate as much of it as you can stand with hardly any more effort than that which you put into whatever Internal Experience you’ve been generating up to this point. When it comes to rewiring your brain, reprogramming your Focus, and installing the Happiness Habit, I’ve experimented with countless approaches to helping people take their Life Experience off of autopilot so they can start creating more of what they want and less of what they don’t. By far the easiest and most powerful approach I’ve found for consciously installing a desired resourceful habit is from Napoleon Hill’s opus Law of Success. Hill was an incredibly smart guy. His understanding of human psychology was way ahead of his time, and much in his work was prophetic in terms of what we now know about the fields of neurology and physics. 100 years later science is still unable to fully explain the forces behind the patterns and laws which Hill uncovered, but if you will harness the power behind these principles and put them to work in your own life they will allow you to create and acquire anything and everything you could ever want.
They have certainly worked wonders in my own life, and that’s why a major part of my life’s work is to share these principles with those in the modern world who are ready and eager to hear them. Following are the essential elements of Hill’s approach to consciously cultivating any habit you wish to install in yourself. First is a brief overview of the nature of habit, followed by a simple 5 Step Process you can use to implement the habit installation process in your own life. I’ve also included some annotations which will expand somewhat on Hill’s ideas, make some useful connections, provide some modern reference points, and make explicit the manner in which his approach can be applied to the Life Loop™ and the Ever Better Life philosophy as a whole. I encourage you to read these words with your immediate goal of abundant happiness in mind, and also to remember that this approach may be used to replace, install, or optimize any habit you need to create, acquire, experience the things you want in life. I’ve reproduced this section of Hill’s work almost in its entirety because, to be totally honest, it doesn’t really get any better than this. It’s literally solid gold. If you’ll integrate this stuff, take the time and make the effort to put it to work in your daily life, I absolutely guarantee without any reservation whatsoever that you will astound yourself with what you are able to experience and accomplish.
Your mind is an infinitely powerful organic machine. It can do more for you than you’ve ever imagined. Here, finally, is the owner’s manual that will allow you to harness its power and start living Better Every Day.
Part 1: The Nature of Habit “Habit grows out of environment out of doing the same thing in the same way over and over again out of repetition out of thinking the same thoughts over and over and, when once formed, it resembles a cement block that has hardened in the mold in that it is hard to break.” Remember: happiness is a habit. Very few of us were born into an environment which fostered happiness as a habit unto itself. Most of us were taught implicitly that happiness is something which occurs involuntarily within us in response to some desirable external extent. As a result, in most cases our unconscious programming has not been set up to consistently generate unconditional happiness. We have been conditioned to think and act as though our Feelings and Emotional States are involuntary reactions to our External Reality.
Viewing things in this way is a wellingrained habit, and it takes time to replace it. “Habit may be likened to the grooves in a phonograph record, while the mind may be likened to the needle point that fits into that groove. When any habit had been well formed (by repetition of thought or action) the mind attaches itself to and follows the habit as closely as the phonograph needle follows the groove in the wax record, no matter what may be the nature of the habit.” A more modern metaphor is that of the ruts which are formed in the snow on a ski slope as people take the same paths over and over again. When a slope is covered in fresh snow, it’s easy to take any path you wish on the way down. Over time, repeated passes down the same channel form ruts from which it is difficult to deviate. Eventually these ruts become so deep and packed down that, once you’re in them, it is almost impossible to get out and take another path. You’re stuck, and you have no choice but to continue all the way down to the bottom and then begin again. The brain of a young child is a little like the ski slope covered in freshly fallen snow; there is a blank space of potentiality and almost anything can happen.
Over time though, and as a result of early environmental influences, patterns of Focusing and Feeling are carved out and packed down through countless repetition. Habit has both a neurological and a psychological component. In reality, these two fields are not separate; they are simply different ways describing the same thing. Remember: the mind is what the brain does. The way your brain “minds” is a result of its physical structure, and this physical structure is in large part a result of the way the minding that your brain has done thought your life. Your brain is like an organic, selfinfluencing computer, and form and function are chasing and influencing one another throughout your entire life. When you form a habit, there are physical changes which occur in the brain that account for the subjective experience of habit formation. Neurological pathways develop and are reinforced in response to repeated Focus > Feeling > Behavior sequences. It makes no difference at all whether the habits associated with these Focus > Feeling > Behavior sequences are experienced as “good” or “bad” by the person doing them; the brain responds to whatever mental activity it engages in by reshaping and rewiring itself in such a way that is becomes easier and more automatic to do so in the future.
After years of reinforcement, these pathways can produce the experience of being caught in patterns of Focusing and Feeling and Behaving as entrenched and inescapable as a deeply cut rut on the side of a snowy mountain. If you’re beginning to lose hope, take heart! Unlike the grooves on a record, your brain is changeable and is always responding and adapting to the Focus and Feeling demands which are placed upon it. If you will learn to exercise the power of conscious and intentional Focusing, you can literally rewire your brain, develop neurological pathways and install habits worth having! “We begin to see, therefore, the importance of selecting our environment with the greatest of care, because environment is the mental feeding ground out of which the food that goes into our minds is extracted. Environment very largely supplies the food and materials out of which we create thought, and habit crystalizes these into permanency. You of course understand that “environment” is the sum total of sources through which you are influenced by and through the aid of the five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and feeling.”
You’ve probably heard before that...
"You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with". This inviolable truth of personal development and conscious living is due to a basic fact of human nature: that we cannot help but respond to and be influenced by the sensory stimuli to which we are exposed. Your Feelings flow from and occur as a result of your Focus, and you can only select what you Focus on from those things which you Notice. The quality of the sensory information you allow to enter into your mind sets the upper limit for the quality of your mental Focus, and the quality of your mental Focus sets the upper limit for the quality of your life. Many people experience themselves as being unable to choose or even influence their environment. If you’re temporarily stuck somewhere that isn’t conducive to resourceful Focusing habit formation, make it a priority to become conscious of and proactive regarding those aspects of it that you can control. You may not be able to eliminate every negative influence from your life overnight, but you can make a point to introduce positive influences into your consciousness.
Consciously go out of your way to expose yourself to influences which will “raise your average” and support the cultivation of your happiness habit. “Habit is force which is generally recognized by the average thinking person, but which is commonly viewed in its adverse aspect to the exclusion of its favorable phase. It has been well said that men are “the creatures of habit”, and that “habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day and it becomes so strong that we cannot break it.” It is an unfortunate reality that, on the whole, many people have been conditioned to be somewhat negative and pessimistic. When the issue of habits come up, most of us tend to default to thinking and talking about those things we do and wish we didn’t. Much effort is expended every year in vain efforts to break unwanted habits, and usually each failed attempt serves to reinforce unresourceful beliefs about our value as people, our intelligence, and our ability to change. If you’ve got bad habits when it comes to Focus > Feeling in your life, great! That tells us that you have the capacity to install habits with practice. As soon as you begin to shift your Focus in a more resourceful direction, a new habit will begin to form and before long it will
replace the old one as the preferred, unconscious automatic neurological route you’ll take in generating your moment to moment experience of life. Making this change does take some time, however. If you’ve been unconsciously generating bad Feelings for years or decades, you’ve unintentionally woven together a strong neurological pattern that’s going to take some time and effort to unwind. Every time you Focus your mind more resourcefully, however, and even when you fall back into the old unhappiness habit and then suddenly consciously catch yourself in the act, you unweave a thread of the old cable and take another step towards fully instilling your happiness habit. “A habit is a mental path over which our actions have traveled for some time, each passing making the path a little deeper and a little wider. If you have to walk over a field or through a forest, you know how natural it is for you to choose the clearest path in preference to the less worn ones, and greatly in preference to stepping out across the field or through the woods and making a new path. The line of mental actions is precisely the same. It is movement along the lines of least resistance passage over the wellworn path. Habits are created by repetition and are formed in accordance to a natural law, observable in all animate things
and some would say in inanimate things as well. As an instance of the latter, it is pointed out that a piece of paper once folded in a certain way will fold along the same lines the next time. Rivers and streams of water cut their courses through the land, and thereafter flow along the habitcourse. The law is in operation everywhere. These illustrations will help you to form the idea of the nature of habit, and will aid you in forming new mental paths new mental creases. And remember this always the best (and one might say the only) way in which old habits may be removed is to form new habits to counteract and replace undesirable ones. Form new mental paths over which to travel, and the old ones will soon become less distinct and in time will practically fill up from disuse. Every time you travel over the path of the desirable mental habit, you make the path deeper and wider, and make it so much easier to travel it thereafter. This mental pathmaking is a very important thing, and I cannot urge upon you too strongly the injunction to start work making the desirable mental paths over which you wish to travel. Practice, practice, practice be a good path maker.”
The quality of the paths you forge in your mind will determine the quality of those you walk in life. Life lived consciously is life lived well. You deserve the a life that is Ever Better. Be a good path maker!
Copyrght Ever Better Life 2016
Contact: Support EverBetterLife.com @
Part 2: Installing the Happiness Habit A Step-by-Step Guide Here is the “doing” part of this guide. This approach will allow you to reprogram your Focus and turn your mind into a happiness machine!
Step 1: Start Strong “At the beginning of the formation of a new habit put force and enthusiasm into your expression. Feel what you think! Remember that you are taking the first steps toward making a new mental path; that it is much harder at first than it will be afterwards. Make the path clear and as deep as you can, at the beginning, so that you can readily see it the next time you follow it.” The key to Feeling good and creating What You Want in life is to keep your mind Focused on it. In this case, What You Want is to Feel good, to Feel happy.
The best and only way to achieve this is to become aware and take conscious control of your mental Focus to ensure that each thought you think from one moment to the next and throughout your day involves making pictures and talking to yourself about What You Want and how to get it. Constant vigilance regarding the content of your Focus can be a little exhausting at first, but tending to your Focus and keeping it working for rather than against you is the price you pay for the ability to choose to Feel happy whenever you want. Remaining conscious of your Focus becomes easier over time, and eventually you will have established the habit of resourceful Focusing so well that it will become automatic and take care of itself most of the time. We’re building new neurological pathways here, and that takes a little work. The brain gets a little lazy after years of unconscious operation; it’s used to doing things its own way and doesn’t always like it when you start butting in, moving things around and asking it to do things differently. Continue imposing the demand of a more resourceful Focus, however, and over time the brain will make the specific adaptations necessary to make fulfilling your request easy and natural.
In order to Focus on something effectively and generate positive Feelings and Emotional States in response, your desires need to be Definite and you need to be Determined to get them. If you’re having trouble Focusing on What You Want, chances are you haven’t identified exactly what that is clearly enough. In the full Ever Better Life course there are two whole modules dedicated to mastering the art of resourceful Focusing. For now it’s enough to start becoming aware of the relationship between what you’re Focusing on and how you’re Feeling as a result.
Are you Feeling good? Are you Feeling happy? If not, STOP: What are you thinking about? What is your mind Focused on? What pictures are you making in your mind’s eye? What are you saying to yourself? You cannot Feel good without Focusing on What You Want, and you cannot Focus on What You Want without Feeling good. Awareness of your Focus and how you’re Feeling in a moment are selfreinforcing, and you can use your awareness of what’s happening with one to infer and become more conscious about what’s going on with the other.
Step 2: Build Your New Path “Keep your attention firmly concentrated on the new path building, and keep your mind away from the old paths, lest you incline toward them. Forget all about the old paths, and concern yourself only with the new ones that you are building to order.” You’re probably tired of hearing this by now, but trust me: you need to hear it: Conscious and Intentional are the key words here. If you're anything like I was when I first started expanding my awareness and keeping tabs on my Focus, you’ll probably get really tired of monitoring and thinking about your thinking all the time and constantly having to course correct when your mind wanders off to Focus on What You Don't Want. Stay on it, though, and remember to think about what you hope to achieve by creating this change in Focus. If you find yourself going down an old, unresourceful Focus road, ask yourself What You Want to get out of that situation. Catching yourself Focusing unresourcefully is a wonderful opportunity to make a conscious shift for the better, and making these shifts is one of the most powerful brain changing actions you can take.
Avoid the trap of Focusing on What You Don’t Want when you catch yourself Focusing on What You Don't Want! The brain/mind can be very stubborn, and it gets really sneaky in its efforts to avoid making new positive changes at first. Every time you Focus on What You Want, visualize new pathways forming in your mind that are custom designed by your unconscious mind to provide you with the happiness you want and deserve. Experience yourself as the growing, evolving, developing organism and point of consciousness that you are. In becoming conscious of your Focus and training your brain to Focus resourcefully, you are witness to a magnificent process of evolutionary change!
Step 3: Travel Your New Path “Travel over your newly made paths as often as possible. Make opportunities for doing without waiting for them to arise through luck or chance. The oftener you go over the new paths the sooner will they become well worn and easily traveled. Create plans for passing over these new habitpaths, at the very start.”
Every time you make a conscious decision to shift your Focus to What You Want and succeed in doing so, you complete another successful pass down your new neurological path and come one step closer to fully installing your happiness habit. Don’t wait for things to happen that provide you with an excuse to Feel good. Feel Good First. So many people go through their lives Feeling less happy than they could because they think they have to wait for a reason before they Feel good. The thing is, though, that you don’t need a reason to Feel good; all you need to do is Focus your mind on What You Want. This can be What You Want out of your current situation, something you hope to create, acquire, or experience in the near future, or some distant life goal. There is a finer art to mastering your Focus that I cover in the full course, but for now literally any resourceful thought content will do. We aren’t at the point of custom designing your life quite yet, though the skills you’re learning now are providing you with the foundation to do so should you decide to proceed further in the future. For now all we’re trying to do is shift your unconscious autopilot program from unresourceful/What You Don’t Want to resourceful/What You Do.
Each night before you go to sleep, ask your unconscious mind to help you wake up the next day Focusing and Feeling better than you ever have before. When you wake up in the morning, make plans to Focus resourcefully and Feel good throughout your entire day, including those times when in the past you’ve tended to Feel bad. Start each day off on a conscious, intentional, resourceful footing by dedicating time to Focusing exclusively on What You Want. This morning, this day, this week, this month, this year. Bathe yourself morning, noon, and night in the endomorphines that occur when you make manifest in your mind that which you wish you make manifest in physical reality. Remember to use your feelings as a guide to evaluate the quality of your Focus.
Feelings are both to be felt and to be learned from. Ask yourself the magic question: “How can I find ways to Focus on What I Want and Feel twice as good as I did yesterday?” Disappointment requires adequate planning, and so does delight.
Step 4: Avoid the Old Path “Resist the temptation to travel over the older, easier paths that you have been using in the past. Every time you resist a temptation, the stronger you become, and the easier it will be for you to do so next time. But every time you yield to the temptation, the easier does it become to yield again, and the more difficult it becomes to resist the next time. You will have a fight on at the start, and this is the critical time. Prove your determination, persistency, and willpower now, at the very beginning.” It’s very easy to fall back into your old ways of Focusing > Feeling, but easy paths that lead to undesirable destinations are of no use to you. Better to take an initially difficult path to the destination you desire than an easy path to disappointment and unhappiness. Remember the importance of Determination: Are you determined to create and experience more happiness in your life? Are you willing to settle for less happiness than that of which you are capable? Life will pay you any wage you demand of it, and you set your wage with the quality of your Focus.
Mediocre Focus = Mediocre Feelings. Be conscious when it comes to the meanings you assign to any initial difficulties you may have. What does it mean that you are inclined to Focus on What You Don’t Want in the beginning? Does it mean that this is the way things are, or simply that for the time being that path is more well trodden? Focusing on What You Want will be just as easy and as natural, and many times more rewarding after you’ve walked it a sufficient number of times. Remember that you are carving out from your brain and mind the desired circuitry from the infinite possibilities of which the organ is capable. You are like a sculptor of your own external reality and internal experience. It is a privilege to have a chance to choose what your brain will be best suited to do. When you have a setback, experience it with conscious awareness.
When you find that you have failed to Focus on What You Want, the best response is to immediately ask yourself What You Want given this setback in order to get yourself back on track.
Focusing is an active and ongoing process, it never stops. The damage associated with Focusing on What You Don’t Want stops as soon as your Focus shifts, so if you catch yourself Focusing unresourcefully switch it to something better and forget it. Be conscious each day that the fact that you are an organic program which can rewrite itself is a unique and aweinspiring singularity in the universe. This is no small thing! Morning is the easiest time to set the tone for the day. There is a momentum to your Focus and your Feelings, and any break in the day is an opportunity to reroute and optimize. Repeating this process of setbacks and course correction is the price that must be paid for reprogramming and repatterining your brain and installing the happiness habit. Enjoy paying the price! It’s the best choice you’ll ever make! New awareness takes time to cultivate, but it sprouts and is made manifest in an instant. Sometimes much work goes in with no apparent return, only to be rewarded suddenly and for no apparent reason with full fruition of the desired changes in though pattern and internal experience.
The longer you’re made to wait, the bigger the reward!
Step 5: Don’t Turn Back “Be sure that you have mapped out the right path, as your Definite Chief Aim, and then go ahead without fear and without allowing yourself to to doubt. “Place your hand upon the plow, and look not backward.” Select your goal, then make good, deep, wide mental paths leading straight to it.”
There is no goal more assuredly worthy of your time and effort than that of mastering the art of consciously and intentionally filling your life with happiness. With this in mind, and remembering that rewiring your Focus installing the happiness habit is the foundation upon which the experience of life you want may be built, allow yourself to move forward in the cultivation of this habit with great enthusiasm and without reservation. People often Feel unsafe when they undergo the kind of major changes that this habit installation entails, but you can rest assured in the knowledge that you are capable and deserving of as much happiness as you can stand.
And remember: all Feelings flow from and occur as a result of your Focus. If you’re Feeling unsafe as you make this transition, use that Feeling as Feedback regarding the quality of your Focus, see how you’re Focusing on What You Don’t Want, and shift your thoughts consciously and intentionally back to Focusing on What You Do Want! No matter what else you want in life, your primary goal is your happiness and the happiness of those you care about. Whatever else you wish to accomplish can only be achieved by accessing internal resources which are most available to you when you are operating in a state of profound happiness.
Your first goal is happiness. The paths to happiness are neurological/anatomical/physiological as well as cognitive/psychological in nature. You want to be happy. More accurately, you want to learn how to consistently create and experience happiness. You want to be actively engaged in the ongoing processing of generating and experiencing the unique Emotional State you call happiness. To do this, you need to condition yourself to Focus, to think, to “mind” in a way that generates this experience.
The brain is the organ responsible for the “minding” which generates your experience of life, and in order to be able to consistently “mind” in a way that is consistent with your criteria for happiness you need to mold and shape your brain through consistent and persist practice. The mind is where experience occurs. The mind is an activity, a function of the brain. The mind is what the brain “does”. We create a mind capable of creating desired experiences by exercising or stimulating the brain to reconfigure in ways which facilitate the desired type of “minding”. At the same time, we create a brain capable of doing this kind of minding by thinking/minding in ways which most closely approximate the many in wish we want it to, with the metafocus of Focusing on what we want to achieve in attempting to get the brain to do so. Struggling to repeatedly shift your Focus and cultivate the happiness habit is like starting out lifting 50 pounds with great effort with the goal in mind of eventually lifting 300 pounds easily. It takes time to reach this level of mastery, but time is going to elapse and life is going to unfold whether or not you master the art of Feeling good for no reason.
If you struggle in the beginning, good! Struggle and the experience of effort are signposts which let you know that you are doing something, and consciously doing something to improve your experience of life is always better than doing nothing at all. It can’t be too often repeated: the happiness you desire isn’t a thing to be obtained, it’s an ongoing activity, the elegant performance of which is a skill which it is now your privilege to master. I have great love and compassion for anyone who demands more happiness in and from life than they have gotten so far, and I have tremendous faith in anyone who is determined enough to find a way to create that happiness to have made it to the end of this course. If you’re reading these lines, that includes you. You deserve to be happy, you’re capable of it, and you now have the knowledge you need realize your potential in the daily reality of your life. All that remains is to consciously and intentionally utilize the determination you’ve used to make it through this course in your moment to moment experiences throughout each day. Every moment is an opportunity to Focus and Feel better than you did the moment before. Life is cascade of opportunities to have, do, be, and experience Better, and it is my sincere hope that you take advantage of as many of these opportunities as you possibly can.
Knowing is good; doing is Better. Go give this knowledge power by bringing it to life in the reality of your daily experience. Consciously manifest the life I promised you at the beginning of this course, and enjoy the experience of perpetual improvement that is your birthright and destiny.
“‘How is habit formed?’ I asked myself mentally. ‘By repetition,’ came back the answer. ‘But I have been doing these things over and over thousands of times,’ the other fellow in me protested. ‘ True, but not in orderly and concentrated fashion,’ replied the echo. From a mental stimulus, created by willpower, I progressed in habit building. Day after day, I practiced concentration of thought. When I found repetition becoming comfortable, then I knew that I had won.”
- Keep Getting Better Dr. Steven Ravnstag
Copyrght Ever Better Life 2016
Contact: Support EverBetterLife.com @
About the Author Dr. Steven Ravnstag is the developer of the Ever Better Life online program, creator of the Life Loop™, and happiness coach extraordinaire! His intuitive methods of helping you create the exact life experience you want can't be compared to any other coach or guru. Steve has been described as "The Manifestation Matchmaker" because people who work with him begin to attract amazing people, situations, and circumstances into their lives. His candid, realtalk approach to coaching and teaching helps to break down the walls that keep most people from getting results from traditional "personal growth" programs. He offers a free 30 minute consult for anyone who is interested in experiencing his style of coaching to see if you're a good candidate for the Ever Better Life course. Visit EverBetterLife.com for more info or to set up a consult.